Transcript: Alice

Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky, and disturbing children's books, films, and TV. I'm Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray. Today we're talking about Jan Švankmajer's Alice from 1988.

Enjoy!

Ren Good evening, Adam.

Adam Dobrý večer, Ren. Good evening.

Ren Oh very good! Do you — I’m immediately diverted into asking you how much Czech you know.

Adam Nerozumím Česky. I do not understand Czech.

Ren Neither do I.

Adam Duolingo is a fraud, a fraudster, an owl fraud.

Ren Yes.

Adam A hustler who is quite good at teaching you chess, but not languages.

But nonetheless, it doesn't matter too much because the film we're talking about this evening, Something from Alice, or Alice in Czech: Něko Z Alenky, by Jan Švankmajer, well, it does have narration, but I think you could still enjoy it even if you didn't read the subtitles. Previous to this, most of Svankmajer’s animations — Švankmejer is a Czech surrealist. Known in the West largely as an animator, but he would say that foremost he's a surrealist and he works in lots of different mediums. He makes collages, sculptures, tactile poetry with clay, and also animations. And a lot of his earlier works, so this is his first feature-length film we're looking at, from 1988. So just around the collapse of communism in Czechoslovakia, shortly to become the Czech Republic.

And because of that, it was no longer so easy to get state funding. So obviously under communism, while there was censorship, there was the advantage for filmmakers and animators that you could receive state grants, state funding. You might not be able to make exactly the films you wanted to make, but you would at least get some money.

Under capitalism, however, theoretically there's no censorship, but there's still the censorship of the market. And so suddenly filmmakers who'd worked under a state-sponsored system for decades had to quickly adapt to a private marketplace. And Švankmejer fortunately received funding from Film 4, Channel 4's film company.

Because back in the good old days, well maybe not good old days, but back in the 1980s, Film 4 actually had a remit to fund and provide innovative experimental content when they began. So before Big Brother and reality TV, Channel 4 actually did produce some really interesting stuff, particularly animation. So this was a project that was co-financed by Channel 4, and it was actually, I believe, broadcast on Czech state TV, but also Channel 4 in 15-minute segments over a Christmas holiday.

Ren Wow, what an interesting choice. Yeah, I mean actually I could imagine it, I could imagine enjoying it in 15-minute segments. Because it’s so dense.

Adam It's really dense. You re-watched it quite recently, right?

Ren Yeah, it was on at the Glasgow Film Theatre last month, so I went to see it for the second time I've seen it, but the first time seeing it in a cinema.

Adam Was it part of any kind of strand?

Ren It was, they were sort of doing a mini kind of puppet strand.

Adam Ah, a mini puppet strand. It sounds like a strand from a puppet, a little thread.

Ren Yeah, so there was also Little Shop of Horrors, and I think Dark Crystal, yeah.

Adam Suddenly Seymour has become the only duet that me and my friend Angharad can do at karaoke.

Ren Amazing.

Adam Yeah, I'll have to record us doing it to send it to you.

Ren Oh, I'm going to karaoke on Monday, and I'm planning on doing Grow For Me.

Adam Oh, amazing. Because Angharad mostly sings musical theatre and Disney songs, and I don't know much, if I'm honest, but I can do Suddenly Seymour, so it's really fun.

So yeah, I re-watched Alice about two years ago at the BFI. I can't remember what that was part of, but I re-watched it with Leah, when we just got together, actually, and she hadn't seen it before, and my friends, Monique and Alwyn. And I'd forgotten how dense it is, if I'm honest. It's quite a lot in a cinema.

I discovered this, actually, through Channel 4. I'm a little bit too young to have watched it on release, but Channel 4 went on to finance another later Švankmejer film from 2000, Otesánek , or Little Otik, which is more for adults, because it's more explicitly bloody, but it's based on a Czech fairy tale about a tree stump that becomes a cannibalistic wooden baby, basically, and gobbles everything down. And I actually, I used to stay up late watching Channel 4 to catch King of the Hill, mainly, and this was broadcast very late on Channel 4, and I'd never seen anything like it. I must have been 15 years old, I guess, maybe 16, and it was completely revelatory for me.

I ended up writing my MA dissertation on Jan Švankmejer and Alice, and actually my PhD is more broadly on Czech animation. So yeah, it's a film I've watched a lot of times, but it's really interesting going back to it, because I feel differently or slightly differently about it every time. So how did you find it on rewatch?

Ren Oh, I really enjoyed it. I mean, it's just like a festival of texture. It's all texture.

Adam It is a very dense phantasmagoria of textures, yeah.

Ren Yeah, I think I said to you it's going to be like our first 100% texture of the week episode, because it's just...

Adam The film is a texture. I've never seen a film with, or heard a film with so many crispy sound effects. The sound design, the foley work on this film is extraordinary. It's just got all this gorgeous close-miked foley sound effects of crackling and slurping and rattling.

Ren Clacking and creaking and crunching.

Adam Any onomatopoeic word you could think of is in this film.

(extract from Alice of creaking, clattering, whinnying)

Ren Yeah, I saw it with a friend who found it a bit much, and I was like, that's fair.

Adam Yeah, Leah found it a bit much. And did you watch this, did we watch this together when I convinced the Film Society at York to put it on?

Ren Oh, I don't think so. I'd maybe fallen out with them by that point.

Adam Oh yeah, well, I will say I mentioned this. I think on my Substack, maybe, but Ren took a stand against the University of York Film Society. It was very heroic.

Ren I did, yeah.

Adam Basically, they were so against Amelie, not because of any progressive reasons like, oh, Amelie is a bit white for a film set in Paris. Nothing like that. They just thought that Amelie was too cute and insufferable.

And so the guys, largely, running the Film Society insisted on only putting on the most punishing films by, you know, the likes of Lars von Trier and Hanneke, in which mostly women suffer horribly. Week after week after week. And I think it got to Irreversible or something particularly unpleasant.

And I remember you, didn't you like stage a one person protest? I think you wrote on the whiteboard or something like, you don't have to stay for this.

Ren Well, I wrote a content warning on the whiteboard because they weren't going to do that. And I was like, I think people would need to know going into this film. And then you know, being proto-woke in 2008.

Adam Yeah, you were woke before woke was woke. Yeah.

Ren Yeah, I did that and they rolled their eyes.

Adam All the film bros.

Ren And I was like whatever!!

Adam Yeah, it all got pretty miserable, to be honest, watching just really gruelling films. But I will admit that in a way some people might find, and I really want people to watch this, right? I don't want to say this film is a bit gruelling because I love it. But you have to immerse yourself in a lot of dilapidation and textures that might make some people's skin crawl a bit.

Ren Oh, yeah.

Adam And I enjoy that, but you possibly have to be wired a certain way to like it.

Ren Yeah, I think so.

Adam Because I remember someone after the screening at York, a guy came up to me and said that was the worst film I've ever seen. Was not happy.

(clattering background side effects)

Ren I feel like I watched it with the dub first time.

Adam Oh, really? I'm trying to remember whether my video of it was an English dub. It might have been because it used to be.

I mean, I got hold of it on video, probably from eBay. I've got Little Otik on video and Faust, which is the follow up to Alice as well. And Faust definitely has a dub because the dubs by Andrew Sarris, the guy from Fawlty Towers who plays Manuel. And he does all the different characters.

Adam (in edit) By which I meant Andrew Sachs. Andrew Sarris wrote about auteur theory.

Adam And here you also have like one narrator do the voice of all the characters. And in the Czech soundtrack, it's the girl who plays Alice.

Ren Although those aren't her lips, I learned today.

Adam Oh, aren't they? So every time you get narration in this film, you get an intercut to an extreme close up of a pair of a girl's quite chapped lips, I noticed this time. Clearly wasn't allowed to drink water when this was being recorded.

I also asked, so I wrote down in my notes, Kristýna Kohoutová, so Kristýna Kohoutová’s lips. But I guess they're not her lips, just her narration. And her, her being Alice.

Ren Yes. Although sometimes she's a small porcelain doll.

Adam That is true. Re-watching it, I really liked her in this. And I think she's great, actually. And to memory, Švankmejer wasn't very happy with her performance.

I think she'd maybe gone to drama school or something and felt that she was too trained.

Ren OK.

Adam And she's quite stiff. But actually, that really works here because you don't necessarily want a wholly naturalistic performance. And Švankmejer has talked about how he uses actors as puppets, basically. And she is almost a prop as well in this film.

And it's odd because normally you talk about objectification as a really bad demeaning thing. But it's tricky with Švankmejer because he loves objects so much.

Ren And the objects have so much life.

Adam Exactly. He stridently believes that his job as an animator is to coax out the inner life of objects. He's talked quite insistently in an interview that he's not bringing life to the objects. The objects have inner life. And that he's like an alchemist who just coaxes that out. So, yeah, her being slightly object-like in the film is not necessarily a bad thing in the way that it would be in almost every other film.

Ren I think one of the first conversations we ever had was about Jan Švankmejer.

Adam Really? So how did it come up? Can you remember?

Ren I think it was after the Film Society and we were talking. I don't know how it came up, but I know I had the DVD, like the short film box set.

Adam Oh, the BFI. So this was also released by the BFI. And there's a gorgeous, I really recommend it actually, BFI collection of Švankmejer short films that you can get. And mine is sellotaped together at this point in the box because I've carted it around to so many places.

RenYeah, I've had mine since I was about 18 as well. But yeah, I remember that being one of our first conversations.

Adam And our love of textures only flourished!

Ren I know.

Adam And did you read or have Alice in Wonderland read to you as a kid?

Ren Yes, I have distinct memories of my dad reading it to me. I remember I got a particular case of the giggles when she's falling down the rabbit hole and is asking herself, do cats eat bats? Do bats eat cats?

Adam I’m sure there's another line I remember you liking, which she says to a nursemaid like, ‘Oh, I'll play the hungry hyena and you'll play the bone.’

Ren Yes, I do love that as well. Maybe I was just being contrary but I remember preferring Through the Looking Glass as a kid, but I did read both of them very fondly.

Adam Is the Cheshire Cat in Wonderland or Looking Glass?

Ren That's an interesting question.

Adam Because notably, the Cheshire Cat is not in this film adaptation. Which makes me feel like the Cheshire Cat must not be then.

Ren No, he is in Wonderland.

Adam Yeah, I've got my copy so I can see John Tenniel's illustration. And it seems like a very odd choice not to include the Cheshire Cat, because Švankmejer often has clackety teeth. Creatures with really biting, clacking teeth.

Ren Yeah, like the interpretation of the caterpillar.

Adam Yeah, the caterpillar is almost much more what you'd expect of the Cheshire Cat. So it's strange because otherwise it actually does stick in many regards pretty close to the events of the book. I would have watched Disney's version as a kid, which now I find a bit too pop art and a bit garish, maybe. I remember really liking the Alice in Wonderland inspired maze at Disneyland. As a kid, Disneyland Paris, that was probably my favourite part going there as a child.

But I don't think I had Alice read to me necessarily, because my mum doesn't like it. It scared her as a kid. Her mum, so my granny, read her Alice in Wonderland and the Water Babies, and they both really scared her.

Ren Oh. Damn.

Adam So I'm not entirely sure when I came to it. I do remember reading it to my little sister, Phoebe, when she was a bit older than a toddler, I guess when she was little. And I remember I had her read Alice and I read all the other parts.

And I don't know if that was inspired by this film, but that was cute. So in some ways, it's a very loyal adaptation.

Švankmejer says it's an adaptation of his experience of reading Alice in Wonderland as a child. Which is interesting because Raúl Ruiz, who is a Chilean director I really like, said exactly the same thing about his adaptation of Treasure Island. And Raúl Ruiz even said that he didn't reread Treasure Island before making the film.

I think this is close enough that I assume that Švankmejer did reread it because there's lines directly taken from the book. But I do get what he means. It's very much... Okay, so in the original Alice in Wonderland, there's a lot of game playing, especially like little philosophical jokes and puns and verbal game playing.

I mean, Charles Dodson or Lewis Carroll was obviously really intelligent. He was a mathematician, possibly a mathematics don, I think. And that's very present in the book.

There's definitely bits as a kid that you're not going to quite get, or little strange little thought experiments that might confound you a bit as a child. And it's really interesting that in Švankmejer’s version, most of that is gone. So it's much more focused on the material object world.

And it's like Alice as a dream, like structured around dream logic. But it's almost like it's pre-linguistic. Like it's almost like Alice as imagined by a child in the oral stage or something, like a really little kid.

So it's filled with like infantile, oral cannibalistic energy. You know, as I said, Švankmejer is a surrealist. He calls himself a militant surrealist, right? He takes his surrealism seriously.

And this isn't like Tim Burton, and I like Tim Burton, but it's not Tim Burton kind of pop surrealism, right? It's very much surrealism as rooted in the traditional surrealist movement, which tends to be rooted in psychoanalysis and dream work. And so there's a lot of libidinal energy in this film, certainly centred around the mouth, right? And gobbling things up and spitting things out and spewing and eating. And Švankmejer had a lot of problems with eating as a kid.

So he must have been under Stalinism, actually. So he was born around the end of World War II. And obviously Czechoslovakia was part of the Eastern Bloc, was ruled, was really a sort of Russian proxy state.

Now, it is worth saying that the Czechs voted in the Communist Party. And so the communists were democratically elected. But there definitely was a level of like, privation and oppression under Stalinism, especially.

Like, not to the degree that there was in Russia. You know, I think it's kind of easy to imagine lots of people, you know, in every Eastern European country being sent to the gulag under communism. And that wasn't necessarily the case.

But people were put on show trial. And Švankmejer himself has talked about being followed by the secret police and that his activities were definitely monitored. And there were times in the 1970s, say, where he wasn't able to make the films that he wanted to make.

But yeah, he had to go to a food camp as a child, which he's talked about as being very traumatic, basically. And, you know, you can, I guess, imagine that a sort of food camp in the 1950s under Stalinism probably would have been a tough place.

And so he sort of spoke in an interview about how that had, you know, a really formative effect on him. So there's a lot of anxiety about eating and about food in his films that you really see in Alice.

Ren Mm. And food turning into other things and, you know, opening up a tin and it being full of beetles and...

Adam Oh, when Alice is imprisoned in the pantry. Yeah. I mean, that's an amazing phantasmagoric scene. So yeah, these bread rolls, sprout nails, like they're almost landmines. And yeah, a can's opened up and it spills open with beetles. And there's slathering slabs of meat as well. Like one crawls its way out of a cooking pot.

Yeah. I mean, some of those feel like a bit of a warm-up for a couple of short films he made a few years later. So a film called Meat Love, which you can watch on YouTube and it's like 30 seconds long or something. So well worth it.

Ren And you should.

Adam It's a bit of a one gag film almost, but it's really good. And then really three short films stuck together called Food, which is one of his greatest kind of short film achievements, I'd say.

And most Švankmejer’s up on YouTube. And obviously I would recommend buying the BFI editions because they have lovely extras and they're just beautifully curated, to be honest.

But admittedly, you can watch, I think, all Švankmejer pretty easily. I think he has a lot of fans in the West. You know, a lot of people discover Švankmejer and find it exciting and want to share it with other people.

And I understand that impulse. Like, I remember getting Alice on the video and then in sixth form, like the first year of sixth form, 16, and just sharing it with so many of my friends. Had a bit of a bad influence on my late best friend, Peter, I remember.

Ren I thought of this as I was watching it.

Adam So the white rabbit in this film is a taxidermied rabbit who wears this red and gold trim uniform and a hat and also wields a very sharp looking pair of scissors, which he kind of opens and shuts in a very sinister fashion. And Peter was very inspired by this and chased me around the sixth form, like the white rabbit, sort of clacking his teeth at me and wielding scissors.

Ren Yeah, I did think of Peter as I was watching it.

Adam It's funny, I don't want to sort of go through the whole plot. I'm aware that we've already been talking for like half an hour. I will say, listeners, if you're like, ‘Oh, Adam's not letting Ren get a word in’ Ren has given me permission to talk lots this episode.

Ren I have. I have not done a master's degree at all, let alone one on this subject.

Adam You wrote a really good essay about puppets. I remember proofreading it and you talked about like Bread and Puppet theatre.

Ren I mean, I do love bread and puppet still, an enduring influence in my life.

Adam And I think out of the pair of us, you're the most like a puppet.

Ren Thanks.

Adam You know, sort of sprigly, occasionally debonair, slightly anxious puppet, you know?

Ren Well, kind of like a marionette or a...

Adam I imagine you as being a hand puppet that leaps off the hand and becomes a marionette.

Fashions yourself into a marionette.

Ren So what do you think about the horror of Švankmejer’s Alice?

Adam Okay, so I want to say the film starts quite deceptively, and I almost wonder if it's a bit of a joke, because it starts with this rather lovely opening shot on a riverbank, which implies that we might be getting some kind of traditional pastoral Alice in Wonderland, like outside, you know, in a garden, like most of Alice in Wonderland is. And then after that we're like, no, we're in warehouses and dingy apartment blocks.

Ren We're in the basement —

Adam We’re in the basement, get used to it. And some of those basement locations, which is Wonderland, I guess, like who would have thought a grimy basement could be Wonderland? But yeah, some of those locations are just quite creepy, because they look dirty and dilapidated and sometimes claustrophobic. And I think the central, kind of middle stretch of the film is probably the scariest.

So Alice ends up being mistaken by the white rabbit for his maidservant, Mary Ann, I think. And is tasked with retrieving his scissors. I checked in the book, it's his gloves. But Alice then dutifully goes to the rabbit's house. And here, it's like, it's a rabbit hutch.

But it's like, if you imagine someone living in a shack and they sort of model their house on a rabbit hutch. To me, there's something almost Texas Chainsaw Massacre about it. This is the bit that scares me the most, like the doors have not barbed wire, but I guess, like the kind of wire —

Ren — on a rabbit hutch.

Adam On a rabbit hutch. And then she pulls back the cover on the bed and it's covered with dirty straw and stones.

It's like a human bed, but yeah, covered with this cruddy straw or stones. It looks dirty. And then she opens the wardrobe and it's really hard to tell what exactly is in there.

To me, it looks like animal skins and furs, which would make sense, you know, in terms of an animal, I guess, wears fur. But it almost looks like a kind of serial killer's house to me.

Ren Yeah, I know what you mean, yeah.

Adam And then when Alice gets stuck in the house, so Alice grows back, like she does in the book, to her full size, and gets trapped in the white rabbit's house. And the white rabbit is really angry and affronted and starts trying to get her out of there increasingly aggressively.

And so it starts sort of pounding on the door and breaking it down. And I swear there's this bit where he sticks his head through. It almost looks like Jack Torrance in The Shining.

Ren Yeah, and I think he's trying to saw her arm off as well.

Adam Yeah, he tries to saw her arm off, which is awful. And at this point, Alice is ginormous.

So I guess from the perspective of this rabbit and the animals, she's a monster, right? She's this giant homunculus, this hulking giant creature that's taken over his house, like some horrible intruder. And it's the rabbit's house. So from the rabbit's perspective, it's Alice that's monstrous, but obviously our sympathies are with Alice.

And he's hurling stones at her. And he's accompanied by this coterie of... what would you call them?

Ren Bill the lizard.

Adam And yeah. I mean, they're sculptures. They're like sculptures that...

Ren A skeletal entourage.

Adam Yeah. They're these skeletal hybrids, basically. So like spines connected to the bird's heads or ribcage, like bits of fish skeleton.

And they've been kind of cobbled together into these sort of horrible living sculptures, basically.

Ren And as they ride in it's like horse hooves.

(clip from the film of horse hooves and neighing)

Adam And there's a snapping bird smeared with... It pops out of a jar smeared with some kind of mustard coloured preserve. There's a lot of preserves and pickles.

Ren Oh yeah, there really are.

Adam And it actually was quite viscerally scary for me because I was attacked the other week by a crane.

Ren Oh!

Adam I went on a safari in Norfolk. So it's a nature preserve and it's all very good and ethical. It's just got ungulates and birds, basically. So lots of deer, some water buffalo and bison and also herons and storks and cranes. And, you know, obviously all the deer seem kind of gentle. They looked like they were covered with ticks, so I didn't really want to pet any. But they seemed quite placid and friendly.

And then we went... so we were on these buggies that I guess together made a convoy. And I had assumed that all of the animals would see this convoy as some kind of apex predator, basically.

Like some kind of giant mechanical caterpillar and that they'd all be scared. But these cranes... well, if they were scared, they definitely went into the fight of fight or flight. So they, yeah, came over on their long legs and as we came past, it just lurched forward and it was snapping at me. And honestly, it was like Rod Hull with Emu. I kid you not, it was scary. Leah's mum got bitten and got her arm bruised. I was like hiding behind my bag. They were properly going for us.

Ren That's terrifying.

Adam It genuinely was very scary, to be honest. Yeah, so that bit where Alice gets sort of snapped at by a bird, quite viscerally brought that back.

Ren Oh, what do large birds have against you?

Adam What? Have I repressed something, Ren?

Ren You know, you always used to get chased by the geese.

Adam Oh, on York campus. That is true, actually. I would get chased by the geese. My dad always gets chased by chickens. Chickens don't like my dad. I don't know. Maybe us Whybrays have a certain scent that birds don't like.

But I mean, this combination of glass eyes and real animal tongues. It's tricky because I haven't eaten pigs for a long time, like since I was 12 or something, since I watched a documentary about pigs playing video games. So I find it difficult, but Czech cuisine is quite pork based. When I've gone over, I remember the scrambled egg in the morning just had bits of pork or bacon in, and it's quite traditional to have roast pig at Christmas. And Švankmejer does make a lot of use of pig's tongues in his work. And that combination of these sort of bulbous glass eyes, bulging glass eyes and pig's tongues is pretty grotesque.

Ren Yeah, the frog later on.

Adam Oh, I don't like that. I've met that frog, actually. Yeah, I went to an exhibition of Švankmejer’s work, some of his sculptures and, yeah, some props from the films in Brighton. Like over 10 years back, maybe like 13, 14 years ago at the university. And yeah, the frog page boy or butler was there.

But yeah, it's eerie and unsettling, probably rather than outright scary. What do you think?

Ren Yeah, I'd agree. And with the tone of the book, Alice isn't really being subjected to horror, but she's mostly being annoyed or being bossed around.

Adam Yes, although that's still here, right? Like Alice being bossed. I mean, it makes me think of my little sister. I've mentioned this before, I'm sure, but she did this amazing drawing of herself when she was a toddler in primary school, when she was just starting primary. And she drew herself as really sort of big and strong and had a speech bubble saying, I don't like people bossing me about like big children.

Ren Yeah, people are constantly correcting Alice's manners and instructing her to recite poetry.

Adam Yeah, well, I've written down here that this is like Švankmejer’s — I’m going to be very academic-y here — but it is like Švankmejer’s playful reflections on Foucault's Discipline and Punishment or something. And I say that only half-jokingly, because before this, he'd done an adaptation of Lewis Carroll's poem Jabberwocky.

And that really, he said that it's a portrait of the psychosexual development of a child. And that totally checks out. It basically is like a kind of filmed version of Melanie Klein's Psychoanalysis of Children. Like the child moving through the oral stage, the anal stage, et cetera, et cetera. And it's like, it's odd because that makes Švankmejer’s films sound quite dry and theoretical, but because they're so embodied and so thing-y, they never feel like that.

And I think it's because, you know, if you could link, I guess, if anyone's interested, my MA on this, my dissertation is still online.

Ren Oh, I'll put it in the show notes.

Adam Sure. And I sort of tried to make the point that psychoanalysis often represses the role of the object. Bill Brown, who used to write on Thing Theory back in the 2000s, sort of talked about how psychoanalysis kind of doesn't quite capture the life of objects, where Švankmejer’s filmmaking is really animistic. So there's a kind of odd tension between the fact that within psychoanalysis, it's very human-centred, everything comes down to the desires of humans. Whereas in Švankmejer’s films, it feels like objects have just as equal desires to humans.

In a film like Beat or The Flat, for instance, which is another great short film with a man trapped in this sort of Kafkaesque situation of trying to escape from a flat and being unable to. And everything he tries doesn't work as it should. So it's like he goes to eat some soup and there's holes in the spoon so he can't get soup to his mouth and that he lies down on the bed and it immediately turns to splinters and collapses. And it's like the objects won't perform their roles as objects.

It's like they're disobeying, they're refusing to kind of meet him on his human anthropocentric terms. And that's the kind of world Alice is stuck in here, it's quite a brutal world. So Alice is often being kind of smacked and slapped but she gives as good as she gets, right? She's quite a violent kid herself.

Ren The recurring thing of none of the handles on the drawers, there's a lot of desks and drawers and every time she tries to open a drawer, the handle pops off and she has to stick her fingers in it.

Adam It's like an object lesson. Like she has to learn how to manipulate, like in an adventure game, how to manipulate the object correctly. She ends up having to pry them open with the scissors or she plucks off the doorknob and then sticks her little finger in and sort of hooks it around and opens it from within. And there's a really satisfying pop sound when the doorknobs come off.

Ren Yeah, it's great. I’ll tell you, I think the bit I found most disturbing was the tea party.

Adam Oh, that's really, so the tea party sequence, um, it's interesting. So Leah likes Švankmejer’s short films, but she struggled a bit with Alice and she actually fell asleep during the tea party sequence in the cinema. But I do get it. I mean, she hadn't slept much the night before in fairness, but I do also get it because it's really hypnagogic. It's quite strange, that sequence.

The editing is really hypnotic. So do you want to try to explain it?

Ren Um, yeah. So it's the same setup as in the book. We've got the Hatter, we have the March Hare. We do get the Dormouse who's played by a mink stole.

Adam Yeah, like a scarf that, licks clean all the cutlery.

Ren And there is a repetitiveness in the book of them —

Adam — Well, repeating the same strange, strange jokes or insisting that she answers the riddle and things like that.

Ren Yeah. And they keep moving around the table. But, in this film that becomes, uh, kind of scripted to an extreme where they do the same motions increasingly fast of is it the Hatter buttering the insides of the pocket watches?

Adam Buttering the pocket watches.

Actually, shall we, shall we do texture of the week? Yeah. I've got, I've got some scissors, they're long ones. Okay.

(scissor noises)

Ren Oh, great. I'll get some scissors too. Okay.

Adam Yeah. Okay. Um, I'll, I'll try to do textury voices.

Ren and Adam (garbled scissory noises) Texture of the week.

Adam Yeah. Um, I think that is probably going to be what's used as evidence to put us away if, evidence is ever needed.

Ren Yup.

Adam So yeah my texture is the butter on the watches because it's a good straight-up surrealist texture, two things that shouldn't be together being put together. Um the classic umbrella on the operating table. And it's actually straight out of Lewis Carroll as well.

Because I think it's important that Švankmejer, you know, really respects this book. He's not ever making fun of the book at all. You know, he considers this one of the great works of Western civilisation, basically.

Ren Yeah. And I believe that that is also in the, the Disney film. But it’s so smooth and clean.

Adam It doesn't have the clagginess, the oily clagginess of the butter against the, the metal innards of the stopwatch. What your texture?

Ren Um, I think mine has to be when, uh, so as I said, Alice is moving between being a human girl and a doll. And then at one point becomes a sort of doll of herself.

Adam Oh, and that, that's the image that Eva Švankmejerová, um Švankmajer’s late wife, who does the art direction basically in the film — so later where we see the King and Queen of Hearts, all the cards are painted by Eva Švankmejerová. And her poster for the film is that moment of Alice breaking free of the kind of plaster cast of herself that she's been trapped inside. She's sort of cocooned in herself.

Ren I can't resist someone being cocooned in their self. Although I have to say that the caterpillar gave me though.

Adam I thought you'd go, I thought cause the caterpillar's kind of like you.

Ren Yeah. Oh, thanks. Yeah.

Adam I don't know why I thought that but the self-stitching, self-darning caterpillar would be your choice.

Ren He darns over his eye to go to sleep.

I do feel quite, um, it does resonate with me.

Adam Yeah. The sock caterpillar. I thought so.

I thought rewatching it, I was like, yeah, that'll resonate. That sock caterpillar will resonate with Ren. Don't know why.

I really like, um, she accidentally, so there are lots of sock caterpillars that are like inflated or something — I don't know what's been put inside them — and they crawl about and then Alice actually sits down on two socks and it's amazing because the socks look dead! And it's incredible. It's weird because there's only been like 20 seconds, if that, of these living socks and immediately it's retrained you to see the socks as living things.

It’s so strange, it really looks like those socks have been killed. She's accidentally killed them.

It's like a magic trick. And that's one thing I love about the stop motion in this film is even though — well, I don't know if it's even though — maybe it's part of it, the stop motion will be quite janky.

Like it's not like Laika’s stop motion, say, where it's digitally cleaned up afterwards. You know, everything's juddering and you can almost see the kind of frames between, between the movement. It's very obvious that stuff's been animated and yet that seems to make it more alive.

I don't quite know why but it makes it more convincing and it feels more magical somehow.

Ren As I was saying, it's a very grimy sort of setting, but incredibly magical.

Adam At the start of the film Alice says, and you almost wonder if it's Švankmejer himself talking that this is a film for children, perhaps. Perhaps. And yeah, perhaps it's children's horror, I don't know.

I showed it to my brother and sister when they were still kids and they kind of liked it. They thought some of it was funny and they were a bit scared of it.

Ren There are very whimsical moments like the rat on top of Alice's head.

Adam Yeah. So there's this funny little scene with a rat in a sailor suit. He tries to light a fire on Alice's head. And it's like simultaneously the cutest and the most sadistic part of the film.

Ren Yeah.

Adam Gets out his tiny little cans and he's got the tiny little food and all of the food, just the tiny food still looks just as unappetising as any other food in Švankmejer’s films. And he cuts off some of her hair to help light the fire and places the little stones in a circle. And I loved the fact that Alice is really patient. Alice is trying to look up and see if she could see what's happening on her head. And then eventually she says, 'this has gone quite far enough’. And I think he tries -- doesn't he try to knock the wooden post into her skull. I think he succeeds.

Ren I think he does. Yeah. But when he starts to light the fire, then she's like —

Adam ‘Well, that's quite far enough.’ And dunks her head into the water.

Oh, and later you see, you see the rat in a corner in a rat trap.

Ren I know.

Adam It's sad. I like that little sailor rat.

Ren There's a real piglet. There’s a real hedgehog.

Adam Oh, the piglet's pretty cute, actually.

I've made a list, actually, of Švankmejer’s films as horror films. I published it on Kittyy Sneezes some years back now. That goes from the mildest, something like Picnic with Weizmann, for instance, which is quite whimsical, really, has a sort of ghoulish ending, but isn't much of a horror, really, to, say, Cellini or Lunacy, which is his adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade, which is genuinely pretty nasty and quite a hard watch, I found. I think I've only watched it once, maybe twice, actually, because I did re-watch it in case it was useful for my PhD, I think. It’s tough.

So his works definitely do run the whole spectrum from appropriate for children to only for adults.

Ren We’re coming up to an hour, and, yeah, I see what you mean, there's so much more.

Adam Oh my gosh, Ren, I've hardly got through any of these notes. What do you think about the white rabbit being everywhere? Because that white rabbit crops up a lot, poking his head out of drawers and crops up out of the Mad Hatter's hat, I think in the dinner party scene as well. I think he's more present than he is in the original book.

Ren I think he is, yeah, I think you're right. I didn't really notice it as I was watching it, it felt sort of appropriate.

Adam Because I noticed this time, it’s not a match shot or anything, but there's a bit where he hits Alice's hands with, with his oars.

It was a painful moment. Švankmejer was great with these close mic'd foley, hyper-real foley noises, so they really do sound like they're whacking her hand. And there's a moment right at the start of the film where Alice's older sister slaps her hand away. And it is almost like a deliberate repeat of that, so I wasn't sure if the white rabbit kind of represents the adult world, or the world of authority, basically.

Ren He's much more like the Tenniel illustration than...

Adam Certainly than the Disney one. The Disney one looks quite mild-mannered and anxious.

Ren The Tenniel one does like quite anxious, but on a spectrum of cuddly to… he’s got the beady eyes.

Adam But Alice is a danger to herself, maybe she does need a bit of discipline. She’s always putting things in her mouth, glugging down bottles of ink.

Ren Yes, it’s ink in this. Ink and some quite tasty little fruit tarts.

Adam The tarts are, I think, koláče, they’re traditional Czech and Polish almond tarts. There’s a bit where one rolls around the table and I couldn’t think how he’d animated it, whether he’d had to glue it every step of the way. I couldn’t work it out.

Ren Yeah, is there anything else you want to say about this in the context of Czech animation, not to introduce your whole PhD into the remit of the podcast.

Adam Yeah, I mean, to a degree, I think it makes sense to think of Švankmejer foremost as a surrealist, right, and to kind of discuss him alongside other surrealist filmmakers. And I don't think, I honestly don't think there are many authentically surrealist filmmakers, certainly not living anymore.

Obviously, Buñuel was a surrealist, not always that keen, I think. I do wonder if I'd been raised a Catholic, maybe I'd get one of his films better, because they're just so anti-Catholic, and I just don't care that much. And I think it was important to him.

I mean, obviously, watched and re-watched Un Chien Andalou. But then, you know, I'm generally happy to consider David Lynch a surrealist, because even though he wasn't a member of any official surrealist group, his ideas came so much from his dreams and meditation. And he was a very intuitive filmmaker, in a way. I don't think surrealism is a style for Lynch. Yeah. You know, it's not like, say, Tim Burton.

I like Tim Burton, but he's not a proper surrealist, it's too much of an aesthetic. I think one of the reasons Švankmejer doesn't like seeing himself grouped in with the other filmmakers of the Czech New Wave is that he saw himself as a surrealist, and being part of a surrealist group who work collaboratively. I've already mentioned that I think Eva Švankmajerová’s work in his films is really important, actually.

That said, I think the thinginess of his works, and the attention given to objects, and exploring the potentialities of objects, like their... unlocking their possibilities, ways that they can be moved, things that might heighten their sense of texture. I would say that's present in Hermína Týrlová’s work, for instance. Now, Švankmajer dismissed her work in interview with Peter Hames as being kitsch. He said, kitsch sweetness. I think that somewhat belies an influence, to be honest. I do think her work probably is a bit of influence on his, as is Jiří Trnka's, I would say.

It's tricky, because I think Švankmajer feels his adherence is to surrealism, right? Like, very profoundly. So anyone who isn't a surrealist, I don't think he's generally... he's not going to name check. But I would say there is a tradition in Czech animation of stop motion and puppetry, basically.

And that is present in Švankmajer work. And he's very much a Czech filmmaker as well. So there's traditional marionette designs in Švankmajer. The Mad Hatter is clearly a self-portrait. It looks like Švankmajer. But it's also a traditional Czech marionette, and it's sculpted in that style.

So my understanding is that German puppet players basically came into Bavaria through the forests in the 18th, 19th centuries and did puppet plays, and that these were popular. And yeah, so I would say puppetry has been taken a bit more seriously, perhaps, in the Czech lands than it has in other countries. Like, they have their own version of Punch, Kasparek. So obviously, we have Punch and Judy shows, or used to in Britain. And Kasparek is like the Czech Punch.

I mean, quite a lot of Czech animation is more obviously for children, though, if I'm honest.

Like, that doesn't mean it's not good. I really like children's animation. But it's not necessarily plumbing any psychological depths.

There's lots of, like, Krtek the Mole, for instance, who's like the famous... Do you know the famous mole cartoon?

Ren No, I don't.

Adam I don't think he's so well known in this country. But like, if you go to the Netherlands or quite a lot of Europe, you'll see him crop up in places. He's a cute little mole with a red nose, I think. And they're very endearing, those animations, but they're very much for children. And as ever, and it's not a comfortable argument to make, but it's true, because it's true of anime as well. You can't wholly discount the influence of Disney on some Czech animators. Now, that's not there with Švankmajer. Švankmajer's definitely anti-Disney.

But there's a whole bunch of children's animation that clearly is... like, if you look at, say, early Trnka, and, you know, Jiří Trnka is like the great Czech animator, basically. I mean, in some ways, I think Hermína Týrlová is more interesting, because she tried animating with so many different materials. Like, she animated with wool, she animated with household objects, she animated with plasticine. Just all sorts, basically.I can't list them off the top of my head, but her style changes quite a bit. Whereas Trnka really kind of honed in on a certain kind of style at a certain point. But he did make 2D animations as well as puppet animations, and he was an illustrator.

And if anyone has seen a Czech animation, it's most likely to be The Hand, or Ruka, which is one he directed in the 1960s. I think it gets used quite a lot on animation courses, about a little sculptor who sculpts flower pots, and then is intruded upon by a white gloved hand that forces him to make little sculptures of hands. And it's a very heavy-handed allegory, because of state censorship in the arts, basically.

But if you look at early Trnka, there's a bit of a Disney influence, if I'm honest. I feel like, oh, I don't want to admit that. But it's the same with anime. If you look at Tezuka's early stuff, like, say, pre-Astro Boy, there's a Disney influence, because Disney was massive. So it's a little bit tricky sometimes to kind of talk about Czech animation, as though it's wholly, hermetically sealed off from all other cultures. Because that's the kind of romantic idea, right? But realistically, I don't think that's actually true.

So yeah, I think there's a kind of Czech sense of humour, maybe, that is often a little pessimistic and self-deprecating. You know, a sense of the absurd that you see in Kafka, absurd pessimism, or pessimistic absurdity, that I see in quite a lot of Czech animation. A kind of homeliness, perhaps.

A focus on small things and small lives. And yeah, and some of it can be cosy, and some of it can be kind of creepy and ghoulish. I mean, I really love, as well as Švankmajer, I really love Jiří Barta, who I think is way, way under-appreciated.

And I think it's because he doesn't have a consistent style. With Švankmajer, you can tell a Švankmajer film very quickly. He's got this kind of choppy, rhythmic, Eisensteinian editing, very much like old Soviet montage editing.

And he has those hyper-real, like cartoonishly hyper-real sounds that are very textured, dilapidated textures, often like bric-a-brac at objects he's picked up.

Ren — yes and teeth —

Adam From flea markets. Eyes and teeth, food that looks disgusting. Yeah, whereas Barta doesn't really have anything like that, to be honest. Each of his films is very distinct. He works almost a different animation kind of form each time. But his masterpiece is probably Krysař, his version of the Rat Catcher, the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Have you seen it? I can't remember.

Ren No.

Adam Oh, gosh, Ren, you should watch it, mate. I mean, it's really properly gross, because it's animated with dead rats.

Ren cackles

Adam So it is manky as anything. It is one of the mankiest films I've ever seen. But it's staggeringly good. So Hamelin is all carved out of walnut wood, as are all the figures. So really dark, rich wood. And in the style of German Expressionism, almost mediaeval woodcuts. So lots of twisted spires and sharp angles with these real rats being animated amongst them.

Ren Amazing.

Adam Yeah, I mean, it looks incredible. And properly unsettling. So yeah, in terms of Czech animation that I would label as horror, Krysař is definitely up there and totally worth watching. You can watch that on YouTube. And to be honest, it was re-released on a kind of indie label recently, so you can pick up on DVD. But that run, it was quite a short run, so it might be hard now. You might have to get it secondhand.

Ren Okay, amazing.

Adam Yeah, top tier.

Ren I think we should probably call it there, even though I'm sure there’s more you could say.

Adam Yeah, yeah. I mean, to be fair, I wrote a whole dissertation on this. Also, if you listen to the Evolution of Horror and you're a Patreon subscriber, I did an episode on Czech horror for that. It's not on the main feed, but if you're a Patreon subscriber, you can find it. I'm sure you can search the archives with Czech or Czechoslovakia or Czech Republic. And me and Mike did the deep dive on Little Otik. So yeah, if you're interested in Czech horror specifically, then that's well worth listening to, because we go through a lot.

Ren Brilliant. All right. Yeah, thank you for talking about Alice.

Adam I mean, gosh, I know I've talked a lot, so my pleasure, Ren. I mean, to be fair, next episode we're hopefully talking about Shelley Duvall and her Nightmare Classics, so that will allow you to just talk about how much you love Shelley Duvall for an hour.

Ren So much. Yeah, yeah. The release schedule might be even more erratic in the next few months as I'm moving house, but yeah Shelley Duvall will arrive at some point.

Adam And you know, it gives you an excuse to watch Shelley Duvall stuff with Mattie.

Ren Yeah. Cool. All right. You can email us, stillscaredpodcast at gmail.com and follow us on Instagram at stillscaredpodcast, where I do a collage for each episode.

Adam This is gonna be a fun one.

Ren Yeah, so yeah, check that out for what textural monstrosity I come up with for this episode.

Adam Yeah, oh my gosh, it's gonna be meat and pickles and slathery horrors, oh my.

Ren Do you have a sign-off for us, Adam?

Adam Uh, yeah, uh, check that something's safe to eat before you eat it, creepy kids. Don't just put things in your mouth, okay? Be sensible.

Stay safe.

Ren See you next time, spooky kids.

Ren and Adam Bye!